


Transporter Tribulations

by Alexander Wales (cthulhuraejepsen)



Category: Star Trek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-31
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2020-04-05 06:28:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19043011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cthulhuraejepsen/pseuds/Alexander%20Wales
Summary: Beckham Larmont had always been fascinated with the technology aboard the USS Excalibur, but he believes he might have found an issue with the transporters.Written ages ago, only put online now, since I'm probably not going to do anything with it.





	Transporter Tribulations

Beckham Larmont walked down the corridors of the USS Excalibur, nervously tapping the back of his datapad. The hallways were sterile, which irked Beckham.

When he was thirteen years old, he'd undertaken his first real independent project, which was a feasibility study for adding in plant life to the ship. The ship's oxygen was provided through atmospheric recyclers, but those took energy, and in a crisis where primary and auxiliary power failed, life support would be provided for by enormous batteries beneath the port nacelles, and those would eventually run dry. Beckham's solution had been to line the walls with plant life, which could be grown hydroponically under lights and put behind panes of transparent aluminum. He had calculated out the energy costs, done efficiency studies on different types of plants including those that could be eaten in an emergency, ran psychological simulations to see the effect that it would have on crew morale, and eventually, after five months working on the project during school and in his free time, proudly submitted a fifty page report directly to the captain himself. The captain had smiled and thanked him, and Beckham hadn't heard another word on the subject. Three years had passed and the corridors were still sterile.

The ship was moving at a nice and gentle warp three, and so with no destinations around in the near future, Chief Petty Officer Caldwell had sequestered himself in the transporter room to do some much-needed maintenance. Using a transporter at warp speed was technically possible, but there was nothing to transport to, and wouldn't be for a few weeks, even if someone had wanted to take the risks inherent in a tricky transwarp transportation. It was the fringe cases of transporter function that Beckham wanted to talk to Caldwell about, and he had prepared a segue for himself. Beckham liked to plan out his conversations.

"Acting ensign Larmont!" said Caldwell with a smile when Beckham walked into the transporter room. "Always a pleasure. I've just finished up some calibrations on the transporter, so I have more than enough time to talk." He looked down at the datapad in Beckham’s hands. "What have you got there?" he asked.

"I've been going over some old logs, looking through transporter accidents," said Beckham. He could hear the nervousness in his voice. Already the conversation had skittered off-course.

"You still want to be a transporter chief when you get older? I'd have thought you had your sights set much higher than that. It's not long now before you're off to Starfleet Academy." CPO Caldwell was slightly balding and a little bit overweight, but one of the friendliest people on the ship. They weren't close, exactly, but Beckham had watched over his shoulder on more than one occasion. Caldwell handled the barrage of questions better than most.

"I was looking over the records of the USS Potemkin sir, specifically the accident that happened on stardate 38946, and I had a few questions," said Beckham.

"And I'm always happy to answer," said Caldwell. "Let me just pull up the logs to see for myself." Caldwell tapped away at the console in front of him, going over the same data that was in Beckham's datapad. Beckham waited nervously. "Ah yes, the incident that ended up making a second Riker. What about it? It certainly raises some interesting philosophical questions about why we are the people we are, though I doubt I can give you much in the way of answers there."

"No," said Beckham. "It's about the accident itself. The transporter chief was beaming Riker off the planet. The pattern was dissipating. He compensated by creating a second confinement beam. Once Riker was safely on board, the redundant beam was shut down, but it ended up having the same phase differential as a local storm and bounced the pattern back down to the planet, where the second Riker - the one we now call Thomas - appeared."

"That's more or less it," said Caldwell with a shrug. "It was very rare, but freak accidents like that do happen."

"Right," said Beckham. He let out a breath he'd been holding. "But when I was first learning about transporters, I was told that was impossible. I was explicitly told, by you, that it's the same person at the other end of the transport, because it's the same matter that's getting encoded and decoded."

Caldwell nodded. "That's what I said."

"It's confirmed in all the literature I could get my hands on. But that doesn't match what happened in the Potemkin incident. The matter was, in some way, doubled. I think the extra came from the same energy feeds that run the rest of the ship. The transporters and the replicators work on similar technology. I've wondered for a long time why exactly it was that replicators couldn't make living creatures but transporters could. The matter-energy realignment matrices are complicated, and it would take the work of a few decades to get the required math background, so I tried to figure out the solution to the Potemkin incident without having to look at any math."

"Do you think that Starfleet had no interests of their own?" asked Caldwell. "You're an ensign. The records of Starfleet that you have access to represent more information than you could consume in a thousand lifetimes, but you're still swimming in the shallow end of the data, no offense. Now, I don't have any specific knowledge, nor would I share it with you if I did, but would it surprise you terribly to learn that a research and development lab deep within Starfleet was working on replicating the results of that accident?"

"No," said Beckham. "I thought of that. Maybe in the twenty years since it had happened people a lot smarter than I am were hard at work on being able to make duplicates on demand. The implications of that technology would be enormous."

"Well," said Caldwell, "There you go."

"Only I looked in the code that runs things," said Beckham. "I didn't have a handle on the math, but I know my way around the script libraries and the algorithms that manipulate the math. The transporter code is more complex, so I looked at the replicators instead. You can't make living things with a replicator, but you can make organics. I used a script library to make a living rabbit, or what should have been a living rabbit."

"The replicators prevent that from working," said Caldwell with a frown.

"Right, they do," said Beckham. "That's exactly what happened, the replication failed. But I really wanted to know why, so I put the console into debug mode and watched what was going on when the replicator denied making the rabbit, because I thought what should really happen is that it would just produce a dead rabbit. It's all molecules in the end, right?"

"Right. And?" asked Caldwell. “What happened?”

"The code is complicated," said Beckham. "There's a whole library that's used for bioscreening, to prevent all sorts of contaminants, poisons, and other failure modes that might result from the user of the replicator being - well, stupid I guess. Or maybe malicious, though there are a hundred ways around the bioscreens if you wanted to kill everyone on the ship. What it comes down to is that the replicator's bioscreening protocols have a check in them that says 'is this thing living?' and if the answer is yes, it stops the replication. So I disabled that check."

Caldwell slammed his hand against his forehead. "Ensign, disabling bioscreening is a bad idea for any number of reasons, and that's exactly the sort of thing that gets a boy like you stripped of his provisional rank."

"But it works," said Beckham. To his disappointment, Caldwell showed no surprise.

"Well, congratulations," said Caldwell. "What did you do with the rabbit?"

"Er - I fed it back into the replicator for recycling," said Beckham. There had been a split second when the rabbit had panicked before being dematerialized that Beckham felt like he'd remember forever. "I didn't know what else to do."

"I'm going to have to write you up for this," said Caldwell.

"But don't you see what I'm saying?" asked Beckham. "It's possible to use the replicators to make living things, contrary to what I was taught. In theory, one of the large scale replicators could make a person, if you had all the right data scanned in."

"Theory and practice-"

"I went in and looked at the code a second time, to see when those protocols were added in, and it looks like they'd always been there, from practically the time that replicators were first invented, back in the old days before any of the other checks were in place. There are all sorts of stories about the early replicators going wrong somehow, but they never made fully living organisms, and I think it's because the code has been in place since the very beginning. And the code is written differently from all the other code around it," said Beckham. "It's like someone just  _ decided  _ that replicators couldn't make living things really early on and no one ever challenged it." His throat felt dry. "And there's similar code in the transporters."

"What exactly are you saying?" asked Caldwell. The frown on his face had set there and showed no sign of going away.

"What I'm saying …" Beckham paused. "You're going to write me up for the rabbit?"

"Not for making a rabbit, but for disabling the bioscreening, yes," said Caldwell. "Unless you can give me a very good reason to reward your recklessness."

"No," said Beckham. "I think I'm actually about to make things a bit worse. I tried to replicate the accident that Riker suffered."

Caldwell stared at him. "You touched my transporters -"

"No," said Beckham. "Shuttlecraft E has a transporter in it, I used that one, with permission of Lieutenant Lysander. I rigged up the shields of shuttlecraft D to match the phase differential, used an apple as my target, confined it using two beams, and in the end, I was left with two apples."

"I see," said Caldwell.

"I'm sixteen years old," said Beckham. "I did it in the shuttle bay over the course of a week."

"Am I supposed to be impressed?" asked Caldwell.

"No, no, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying, I've been training to be a transporter chief, or at least a transporter technician, and the transporters work substantially differently from what I've been told." Beckham drew in a breath. "And judging from the way you've reacted to this news, I think that you knew that I was being fed the wrong information. I want to know why."

Caldwell sighed. "Look, I'm grudgingly impressed that you found this out on your own, but-"

"But?" asked Beckham. His voice broke. "But what? But I was lied to by not just you but by all the documents available through Star Fleet? Do you think that I'm just going to accept that?"

"Beckham-"

"It doesn't make any sense!" said Beckham. He felt his emotions overwhelm him, and the things he'd been thinking about for the past few days came spilling out. "We have this capability and we're, we're hamstringing ourselves, and if I could figure this out that means the Ferengi and the Klingons could too, but we don't ever see them using it, unless they are and the records have been scrubbed of that, and I just don't understand why -"

"Acting Ensign Larmont, you and I need to have a chat," said Caldwell.

"A chat?" asked Beckham.

"I'll give you all the answers you want, but first we have to talk to your mother," said Caldwell.

"Why?" asked Beckham. "What does she have to do with this?"

"All in good time," said Caldwell. He stood up from his chair and stretched out. "Computer, block out the next two hours of my schedule and let the Chief Medical Officer know we're on our way."

* * *

 

"This is why you should never have had a kid," said Caldwell as they walked into the medical bay.

"What did he do?" asked Beckham's mother with a single arched eyebrow. Trisha Larmont was the Chief Medical Officer of the USS Excalibur, which meant that she was at the forefront of medical science. She'd encouraged Beckham into the field, but Beckham had always found bodies to be somewhat unpleasant things. He'd never been truly happy with his own, even though everyone else seemed perfectly satisfied with theirs. Maybe part of becoming an adult was learning to love the things that were wrong with you.

"Do you have time for a discussion of how teleportation actually works?" asked Caldwell.

"I might have the time but definitely not the patience," said Trisha.

"He discovered another flaw. This is what happens when you go with the lowest bidder," said Caldwell. "And the system was never designed to survive scrutiny, because we assumed that we'd have suspension-of-belief buy-in from all the residents."

"Excuse me," said Beckham. "Can one of you explain to me what's going on? Is everyone in on this?"

"It's nothing that concerns you," said Trisha.

"We can't keep doing this," said Caldwell. "I mean, it's just not sustainable. You're coming close to contract violation as is. I'm going to tell him."

"Then I'll untell him," said Trisha with an even voice.

"Tell me what?" asked Beckham. His mother using the verb "untell" was worrying to say the least.

"Indulge me Trish," said Caldwell. "Let me try it my way, and if things go poorly you can do whatever you'd like. Give me some time to speak with the boy, and explain things to him. I know you're short on credits, and I think the conversation would be worth something to me. Please?"

The frown didn't leave Trisha's face as she said, "I suppose."

* * *

 

Caldwell and Beckham sat in the holodeck. It was projecting Paris in the 1920s, and they had a view of the Eiffel Tower from a rooftop cafe. The wrought-iron table was laden with a variety of food, all of it made by the replicators and seamlessly positioned by the same force fields that made the chair he sat in feel real.

"It's a nice place, this," said Caldwell. "If I hadn't ended up in Starfleet, maybe I would have gone to Paris. It looks different these days, of course."

"We're here," said Beckham. "You wanted to talk in private. You wouldn't answer my questions on the way over." He looked down at the fresh strawberries and cream, but had no appetite. "I don't even know what the right questions are."

Caldwell sighed. "I'd have hoped you would have figured it out by now," he said.

"I've been lied to," said Beckham. "By the records, and the people aboard this ship. But I don't know what they're covering up, or why. The things you and my mother were talking about didn't make any sense."

"Do you ever think about the holodecks?" asked Caldwell.

Beckham shook his head. "Not too much, no. I spend my time thinking about the transporters."

"Holodecks are amazing things," said Caldwell. "Omnidirectional holographic diodes create the sights, force fields create the haptics, and replicator technology creates the smells, foods, and everything else that can't be accomplished with mere force."

"I know all that," said Beckham.

"Sure, sure," said Caldwell. "But the more you look at it, the more it looks like magic, right? The holodeck is a specific size, but you and I could walk away from each other as far as we liked without the computer giving so much as a beep of warning. You don't think about it, it just happens."

"There are force treadmills," said Beckham. "To give the appearance of moving. And if two people diverge from each other it's just a matter of replacing what they're seeing with the appropriate vision. Two people might perceive themselves to be half a mile away, but in reality they're usually no more than two meters from each other, just far enough that they can't touch. Their field of view gets replaced by whatever the holodeck wants them to see." He waved around him. "Holodeck B is rated for six simultaneous users. That's how we can keep the Fair Haven program running. There's also a capability for two holodecks to be linked so that users perceive themselves to be in the same program. All that's been worked out. It's not magic, and I don't get what it has to do with the replicators and transporters."

"You said you hadn't thought about holodecks," said Caldwell with a kindly smile that Beckham didn't return.

"I trained myself in case there was ever a malfunction," said Beckham. "But you're not answering any of my questions. Why has Starfleet covered up the technological capability to duplicate a living person?"

"I'm getting there," said Caldwell. "Patience young padawan."

"I don't know what that is," said Beckham. He was growing more and more irritable as the conversation went on.

"Before your time, I guess," said Caldwell. "What I'm working my way around to is this; why do we spend so little time in the holodecks?"

"They're not real," said Beckham. "People want to have real experiences. There's something inherently better about knowing that you're out in the real world, interacting with real people. Inside the holodeck it's all just lights and sounds designed to fool you in some way."

"Do you really believe that?" asked Caldwell. "I could override the computer's locks and pull up a list of every holodeck program you've ever run. Would I find nothing on that list? No novel adventures or new experiences?"

"I like the holodeck," said Beckham. "But that doesn't mean that I don't prefer the real thing."

"What if the holodeck were truly indistinguishable from reality?" said Caldwell. "In the holodeck as it is now there are hints that you might pick up on that would make you realize it's false, and lord knows that the artificial intelligence is sub par."

"It still wouldn't be real," said Beckham, feeling stubborn.

"No, perhaps not," said Caldwell. "But think about it. In the holodeck you can alter reality however you'd like. You can change physics, or at least have the perception of changing physics. If the real world bores you, you could burrow into this hypothetically improved holodeck and just never leave. Replicators would make food for you, and the programmed people would be convincing enough that you might forget that they're not real."

"In the 21st century it became possible for people to alter their brains and simply be happy all the time," replied Beckham. "No one did that. There was never any big business in inserting the right wires against the right glands or neurons to give people unconditional bliss until they died. It didn't even have to be regulated. It's because happiness is nothing without meaning. That's the same reason that living life in a holodeck wouldn't be worth it."

"Wireheading," said Caldwell.

"I didn't know there was a name for it," said Beckham.

"There's a difference to be made from wireheading and lotus eating," said Caldwell. "Wireheads just get the pure bliss until someone shuts them down. Lotus eaters sequester themselves into a reality of their choosing."

"Would I find these terms defined anywhere in the Star Fleet database?" asked Beckham. "If I had higher clearances?"

"No," replied Caldwell. He stabbed a strawberry with a small fork and dipped it in cream. He had a look of satisfaction as he ate it. "Now see, you live in a world of wonder, but let me give you a hypothetical. Let's say that warp drives were impossible. There would be no practical exploring of the stars, no alien species, and certainly no Prime Directive. Would you still want to live in that world?"

"Yes," replied Beckham. This felt like a test.

"Are you sure?" asked Caldwell. "Then picture a world where money was never abolished. There's a government dole, a guarantee that you won't starve, but you can't really travel because the dole isn't large enough, and you probably don't have the skills to get a real job, nor does anyone want to train you to get those skills because increased mechanization is forcing unemployment through the roof anyway. There exists something like a replicator, but they're crude and expensive, and can't even really do food. The dole is so small that most of the time you're living a bland and boring life. And then one day, cheap holodecks get invented. So cheap that you can live there full time."

"I don't understand," said Beckham.

"Imagine a crapsack world, Beckham," Caldwell said. He leaned in. "Imagine a horrible, unhappy life where you never go anywhere or do anything, where your opinion counts for nothing, where you spend half your time sitting in front of a computer anyway, getting your thrills from movies, television, and videogames. And this holodeck doesn't just keep you from ever being bored, it keeps you young and healthy, or at least gives you the perception of being young and healthy." Caldwell sat back in his chair. "Maybe you wouldn't put yourself into that holodeck, maybe you would revel in the 'real', but there would be precious few people that would agree with you. And eventually everyone would be in the holodecks, exploring the limits of what was possible. Maybe some of them would find things a little bit too cheap and easy, and start up a simulation where they could live in the future as it should have been, in total immersion, for the most part forgetting that the real world topside even existed. Now, what would you put as the probability that this has already happened?"

Beckham open and closed his mouth. "You're telling me … you're telling me that we're in a holodeck?" He looked around. "Not just a holodeck, but that … that I've been living in a holodeck my whole life?"

"It's an analogy," said Caldwell. "But yes."

"And the reason that the transporter has extra code in it is that the simulation was built wrong?" he asked. A phrase he’d heard earlier suddenly made sense. "By the lowest bidder?"

"That's part of it," sighed Caldwell. "There's a bit more to consider. Let me give you a brief history of the real universe. In the year 1966 there was a television program called Star Trek which chronicled the voyages of the USS Enterprise - the original, NCC-1701."

Beckham had just had his brain smashed against the metaphorical wall, and was having trouble picking up the pieces, let alone making an attempt at reassembly. He'd thought that he was being lied to by Star Fleet, not that the universe itself was a lie. Still, there was some part of his brain that was still functioning in the wreckage where everything else was failing, and that was the part responsible for correcting factual errors. "That wasn't the original Enterprise, the original was NX-01."

"Well, yes and no," said Caldwell. "NX-01 was something of a retcon. But what I'm saying is that world history as you know it prior to 1966 is more or less correct, with the exception of any instances of time travel you might have read about. Time travel doesn't exist in the real world. Neither do alternate universes. Up until about 2020 the world matches what you know to be true, but the Eugenics Wars never happened."

"But," said Beckham. "But how could they have predicted - no, the causality must have been the other way around, and the Enterprise that I'm familiar with is based on the one from a -" Beckham didn't want to say it. "From a television show that's four hundred years old."

"Close," said Caldwell. "The real year is 2076, so the original series was about a hundred and ten years ago in the real universe."

"My whole life is a lie," said Beckham. He slumped down and looked over the Parisian skyline.

"Lie is perhaps putting it a little strongly," said Caldwell. "The world is built to be fully functional and self-consistent. For all intents and purposes it's a real place that really exists. It's not like the holodeck, where you can run the program backwards or change things around if you make a mistake. There's no admin level access. And we employ permadeath."

"If you die here you die for real?" asked Beckham. He wasn't sure whether that was the final straw, where he would have to dismiss everything Caldwell said as simple lunacy or an elaborate practical joke. But simple lunacy didn't explain what he'd seen with the transporters and the replicators.

"No you don't really die, but you get kicked out of the program and have to start over with a new persona," said Caldwell. "You lose all your old relationships and everyone considers you dead. There's quite a bit of working up to the top, you can't just become a transporter chief right out the gate, so there's that to lose too. Positions at the helm are hotly contested. We take things a bit more seriously than some other simulations."

"I want to see the real world," said Beckham. "I want to know what it's really like out there."

"You really don't," said Caldwell. "And even if you had an honest desire to walk on the surface of the real world, you wouldn't be able to afford it. Humanity in physical form is mostly an antiquated concept, by virtue of simple economics."

Beckham looked down at his hands. "That doesn't make any sense. I mean, even if what I know about physics is wrong, it doesn't make sense that it would be cheaper for a person to live in a holodeck than to live out in the world. The energy costs for replication alone would be too much, and you said that in the real world replicators are even more energy expensive than here."

"Imagine that you were just a brain in a jar," said Caldwell. "We could hook inputs up to your nerves to make you believe you were seeing things, to give you the experience of touch, smell, and so on. We could have a small machine hooked up to your bloodstream that would inject chemicals that alter brain function, so that when you believed you were getting drunk you would actually feel it. But that would be expensive, and we could save a whole lot of money by just turning your brain into a program that a computer could run."

Beckham turned to the side and threw up.

* * *

 

After some time had passed, Beckham was able to think straight. Throwing up was a terrible defense mechanism, but it was apparently the only way that his brain knew to deal with hearing so much at once.

"They killed me as a child," he said. "I remember my childhood on the ship, so they must have killed me when I was little, just a baby, and turned me into nothing so much as numbers."

"No," said Caldwell. "I was a human once. I had a real brain that was made digital. You were digital from the start. There was never any 'real' baby." He made quotes in the air with his fingers, as if there was some need to further emphasize his obvious contempt for the concept of realness.

"You were human once, and you gave it up for this," said Beckham. He waved his hand in the air. “For nothingness."

"Hell, I was one of the holdouts," said Caldwell. "But like I said, simple economics. Once the cost to house and feed a human was higher than the cost to run a computer that housed the human's brain, it was basically game over. Maybe it was game over before that, I don't know. It got more and more efficient to live in cyberspace. They started building brain farms, giant structures that could hold a million people each. I was living in government housing, getting my government check. Fine by me, internet access had been declared a human right, I didn't need to go out. But then the checks started getting smaller, each one less than the last. The government thought they had an obligation to keep me alive, but they didn't think that I needed to be in physical form. The cost to feed me and keep my apartment from falling down could fund a hundred brains, and then a thousand. So they fed us worse food and moved us into smaller houses, because it didn't seem fair that some people were getting so much more money than others. The virtuals were being paid a pittance compared to the actuals."

"They forced you to turn into a computer," said Beckham.

"I decided to," said Caldwell. "I made peace with the idea of maybe, possibly dying. It wasn't living in a fantasy world forever that scared me, it was that discontinuity between when I was alive and when I was a program. Funny that I'm a transporter chief now. That's the biggest thing that people worry about, not being the same person on the other end. And now that I’ve made it through, all that worry seems silly."

"Wait," said Beckham. "This still doesn't make sense. What happened to Riker then? Was he just running as two different programs then?"

"Riker is a fiction," said Caldwell. "The vast majority of what you know is fiction, built up by contractors from all the various series of Star Trek, plus the supplemental novels, comic books, and everything else. The reason that there are flaws is that it was impossible to build up a self-consistent universe from all that, at least with the budget that they were working in, which wasn’t large. So long as you've bought into it, it's nothing that would really come up interfere with day to day duties."

"But if Riker were real?" asked Beckham. "The, ah, simulation seems to allow it. Would the double come out braindead?"

"I don't know," shrugged Caldwell. "Maybe so, but I think more likely what would happen is that the meta-program that runs the world would duplicate him and eat up a portion of the communal processing power until he was out of sight, then abstract him out until he was interacted with again. But Beckham, if you want to survive this with your memories intact, experiments like the one you did in the shuttle bay need to come to an end. It's one of the long list of promises that you're going to have to make."

"Mom threatened to untell me," said Beckham. His voice was cold.

"She's done it before," nodded Caldwell. "It's not sustainable. Eventually she'll have to emancipate you and get you on your own dole, but she seems dead set on preserving the status quo."

Beckham frowned. "Computer, make a note to my private logs, the ship is a simulation, I'm being held in against my will, and my mother has the means and motive to erase my memories."

Caldwell laughed. "Come on, you know that she has access to your logs, do you think that she would be so careless as to leave that there? Do you think that you didn't try the same thing last time?"

"We've had this conversation before," said Beckham.

"No, actually," said Caldwell. "I'm just guessing based on what I know about you."

“Computer, record all further conversation directly to my private logs,” said Beckham. The computer made its three-toned beep.

Caldwell seemed more bemused than annoyed. Recording a private conversation was socially unacceptable, but he didn’t seem to care. “Beckham, you’re going to have to face facts. I understand that you want to fight back against the reality that you find yourself in, but in point of fact, your mother pays for your continued existence.”

“Emancipation,” said Beckham. “There’s got to be some way that I can become free.”

“There’s not,” said Caldwell.

“Alright, you said that if I die I get reincarnated or something,” said Beckham. “If I killed myself-”

“Depending on how your mother set it up, you’d go to cold storage and be nothing more than a data file for her to spin back up whenever she wanted, or you would be deleted. There’s a very, very slim possibility that you’d get emancipated, but that would have to happen by her choice, and based on my reading of her, it’s unlikely.” Caldwell shrugged. “I’d advise against suicide. This sim doesn’t pull punches when it comes to dying. I’ve died a half dozen times, and each of them hurt.”

Beckham frowned. “I’m not going to be a slave,” he said. “There has to be a way out. If this simulation was built by the lowest bidder, then has to be some way to escape it.”

“Why?” asked Caldwell. “What would be the point? Even if you go up a layer of reality, you’re still in a computer. Whereas here, you’ve got family and friends who love you.”

“Family and friends who are complicit in my mother’s crimes against me,” said Beckham. “No thank you. If independence is possible, that’s what I want.”

Caldwell sighed. “Maybe the next time you have this conversation with someone, they’ll be able to convince you. Or maybe she’ll let you go when you make it to Star Fleet Academy. Computer, activate holodeck program C1-34, authorization code Empress Zulu Ricter, no overrides please.”

The chair Beckham had been sitting in vanished, and he felt the force fields clamp down around him, keeping him in place. “Wait,” said Beckham.

“Chief Petty Officer Caldwell to Chief Medical Officer Larmont,” said Caldwell with a press of his communicator.

“Larmont here,” his communicator replied.

“My conversation with your son proved somewhat unproductive,” said Caldwell. “Come collect him please.”

There was a pause from the other end. “On my way.”

When it went silent, Beckham spoke again. “Wait, you said that there was a meta-program, what is that?”

“This conversation is going down the memory hole,” said Caldwell.

“I don’t know what that is,” said Beckham. “But please, just tell me. Consider it my dying wish before you wipe out my memories.” He could feel himself sweating. The force field was as solid as any metal known to man, and clamped him down in a way that was as absolute a method of restraint as could be found. In the background, the simulation of Paris kept running.

“Sure,” said Caldwell. “But you’re not actually dying, just getting rolled back a bit. The meta-program is called the Overmind. When we stop by a planet for an away mission, the people there are created and run by the Overmind. If you talk to someone anywhere outside this ship, there’s a very high chance that they’re speaking to the Overmind. It’s run on communal processing power, and keeps creating new things for us to be entertained by. When the contractors built the simulation for us, a good sixty percent of their budget was for the weak AI needed to run things. Happy?”

“Let me go,” said Beckham. “Let me go and I’ll do anything, I’ll help you out in any way that I can, if I get emancipated I’ll give my dole to you, I don’t care so long as I’m free.”

“Tempting,” said Caldwell. “But still no.”

The archway door of the holodeck slid open, and Trisha Caldwell stepped through.

“Computer,” she said. “Freeze any ongoing commands issued by Beckham Caldwell.”

* * *

 

Beckham woke up with a pounding headache.

“Muh,” he said slowly. His mouth felt like it was filled with cotton.

“Just one second dear,” said his mother. Beckham felt the cool metal of the hypospray against his neck, and then with a puff of compressed air the drug was in his bloodstream. Almost at once, he began to feel better.

“Why am I in medical?” he asked.

“We don’t know exactly what went wrong,” his mother said gently, “But you were found inside your quarters eight days ago, collapsed on the floor. I’m still working on a diagnosis. What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I was … doing homework, I think,” said Beckham. His head still felt somewhat fuzzy.

“There might be some memory loss,” she replied. “You’ll have to come back once a day for the next week or so.”

“Am I going to be okay?” asked Beckham.

His mother touched his cheek with her hand and smiled. “Yes, I think you’ll be just fine.”

Beckham got up from the biobed, gave his mom a hug, and walked back to his room. He kept feeling like there was something that he was missing, some explanation for his blackout, but he couldn’t call it to mind. Hopefully it was nothing he’d done. He had a history of getting a little bit too enthusiastic when it came to science.

Just after the door to his room shut behind him, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Who-”

He saw his own face staring back at him. It wasn’t quite like looking into a mirror, since his other self had a look of serious concern, but they were identical down to a small scar just below his hairline that he’d refused to let his mother fix.

“Time travel? Alternate universe? Android, clone, shapeshifter, hologram?” asked Beckham.

“Transporter accident,” replied his double. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I was doing homework eight days ago, and I collapsed,” said Beckham.

His double watched him cautiously. “Do you remember collapsing?”

“No,” replied Beckham. His double seemed relieved by that. “Mom doesn’t know about the transporter accident, does she?”

“Strictly speaking it wasn’t an accident,” his double replied. He sighed. “Seven days ago you discovered an aberration in the historical records. Four days ago you managed to reliably duplicate that aberration. Yesterday you arranged to make a second copy of yourself - me. And two hours ago, your memory was wiped.”

“Wiped,” said Beckham. He had no idea whether to believe it.

“They erased memories,” said his double. “That tells us something about them. They didn’t dive in and enact some kind of retroactive continuity, and they didn’t use any kind of precision. They just wiped everything out and pretended that you had some kind of medical trauma. You didn’t start recording the conversation early enough, and so I didn’t get the full breadth of information, but it was enough to convince me that they have dominion over us.”

“They,” said Beckham.

“Our mother,” said his double. “Caldwell. Our enemies.”

“If I believe you … if I believe what you’re saying, they’ll learn about you,” said Beckham. “It’s not a secret that we can keep forever.”

“No, it’s not,” said his double. “That was the whole point of going to Caldwell, but I think he must have derailed the conversation or revealed something before you could come clean with him. Eventually someone is going to notice that the life support systems are working outside of their normal parameters, or that we’re using the replicators more than we should be. I already trashed the second communicator, but yes, eventually someone is going to notice, and I feel like they’re going to kill me and then wipe your memories again. So we have, at best, two weeks. At that point we reach Rho Lambda, and they’ll run a bioscan that will reveal us. At worst, they figure it out in the next day or so. We need to escape the simulation before then.”

“Simulation?” asked Beckham. His head was spinning.

“Oh, right,” said his double. “We’re both programs in a simulation. I probably should have mentioned that.”

* * *

 

It took some time for his double to relay everything. The recorded conversation had been wiped from the logs, and his double hadn’t wanted to take the risk of downloading a copy to a datapad in case that would show up on the logs. Beckham’s double had hidden in the Jefferies tubes while the room was searched and then rolled back to how it had been eight days ago. That was a capability that they had, according to his double. They guessed that at some point in the past, some version of Beckham had hidden notes for himself, and rather than risk those notes being found, they simply took the entire room and replaced it with a previous version of the room.

“Okay, so the whole simulation is run by a program called the Overmind,” said Beckham. “You and I, along with everyone else on this ship, are also programs, but not being run by the Overmind. We can imagine the Overmind as, say, the ship’s computer, which would mean that the individual people are more like a program running on a datapad which interfaces with the ship’s computer through an interface.”

“Except that I’m being run by the Overmind itself,” said Beckham’s double. “And based on what Caldwell says, I’ll disappear the moment that no one is watching me. But that doesn’t include going into the Jefferies tubes, I guess. We need to learn the rules, fast.”


End file.
